


Tsukumogami

by unreadlibrary



Category: Samurai Champloo
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming-of-age, F/M, Individual Warnings for Individual Chapters, Meiji era AU, Occasional violence, Romance, Slow Burn, Vignettes, maybe eventually fluff, rest of chapters now planned out, slice-of-life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:01:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 10,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28232841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unreadlibrary/pseuds/unreadlibrary
Summary: In 1891, who cared if you were a samurai’s daughter? The world was ruled by gunpowder.
Relationships: Kasumi Fuu/Mugen
Comments: 10
Kudos: 29





	1. Tsukumogami

**Author's Note:**

> I have exactly two one-shots left in "Ocean Thousand, Mountain Thousand" and this was going to be one of them. But it kept getting longer. And longer. Granted, I've written long pieces in OTMT that are longer than this, but I really wanted something before the end of the year, haha. God willing, I'll complete this and update a few other fics too. 
> 
> This is a Meiji Era AU. It's still anachronistic, in good ol' Champloo style, but I try to make the setting relevant from time-to-time. It's told in chronological order but in vignette style. Some are properly long, with an attempt at a plot or at least an arc, and some are just moments. I'll seperate them all as chapters. By adding the work like this, I might even make the work longer. I want to add more Fuugen moments, but as impatient as I can be, I tend to stretch out my writing, haha. The moments tend to feel *richer* when you have to wait. And I like exploring this trio's friendship and Fuu's coming-of-age, so, there you go. Some events are simply reinterpretations of the series, some different and some same-same.

_Tucked away in a dusty hall, there were several items on display at the small “Tsukuomogami: A Slice of Japan” exhibit. A single placard left at the door read:_

_Tsukomogami are items, usually tools of some kind, that have taken on a particular spirit. Being a centenarian seems to do the trick, but that’s really only half the magic. Once an item has lived to the ripe old age of 100, it can only become a tsukomogami spirit if that life was well-lived. A teapot can become a teapot tsukomogami only if it was well-used and if it in turned served well. Show due respect for each item here—each has served its former masters well, and survived more than a hundred years so that they could be introduced to you today. Curiously , these items were all once the possession of a rich widow named Sakihara, who was kind enough to bequeath these items to the Board upon her passing. Together, this collection tells a strange tale. Ignore the anachronisms. Embrace the little known. These items have lived through an era that can never be resurrected: the Meiji Era, the age of the last samurai._


	2. Gunpowder

PART ONE: TSUKUMOGAMI FOR BEGINNING

* * *

**_A weapons display case. Below two traditional Japanese swords hang a Meiji Type 22 carbon Murata single-shot rifle._ **

* * *

The year was 1891. Actually the year does not matter. The years involved have often been disputed. The only important thing was that it was somewhere in the Meiji Era. 

Fuu Kasumi did not act like a girl. That is, she sat cross-legged whenever she thought no one was looking. 

It did not mean she did not like fine kimonos. That she did not take care of her hair. That she did not look at boys like they were the stars themselves. 

But because she was the only daughter (and only child) of her parents, the fact that she did not outgrow some of her tomboyish habits by the time she was fifteen caused a certain amount of strain. 

So, Fuu blamed herself for her mother’s death. 

Later, they called her mother’s disease a long name, a name that sounded more like a bedtime story. Garbled and monstrous, like that foreign word ‘Humunculus.’ Or as grand and menacing as Gashadokuro or Emperor Mutsuhito. It was called tuberculosis. 

Her father was long gone by the time of the diagnosis. Fuu couldn’t remember her father except for the sight of his back, looking as solid as a ghost in a field of flowers. They called them sunflowers. Foreign flowers, yet they seemed familiar too. After all, Japan was the land of the rising sun. The only thing Fuu knew about her father, besides the fact that he was a samurai, was that he had planted that field of sunflowers himself. 

Its the sunflowers that Fuu misses the most. By fifteen, Fuu was without a house, a mother, or a father. In 1891, who cared if you were a samurai’s daughter? The world was ruled by gunpowder. 


	3. First Impressions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair Warning:  
> *Episode One level of molesting  
> *That canon-typical violence

_**In one of the small glass display cases, there is a old pinwheel—the pink paper is cracking.** _

* * *

She was working at a tea room in the capital when her life changed forever. Again. 

Fuu was good at her job. It also gave her plenty practice at behaving more like a girl, and her progress made her happy. She learned how to blush prettily, when to acquiesce wisely, and when enough was enough. Even her old tomboyish habits weren’t terribly unappreciated when it stopped a low-life from skipping out on pay. She spoke her mind, turned the boy out on his ear, and thought that was that. It was precisely how she’d dealt with all the rambunctious country boys back in her old village, and she expected city people were probably more civilized about things in general. 

It turned out, however, that the low-life’s father was head of the local militia. 

Fuu had barely registered the reappearance of said low-life when two of his friends had pinned her against the tea room’s backwall. The rest of the customers in the tea room scattered for the entrance, but Fuu swore she saw someone new enter. She’d just caught a glimpse as she was turning her head, but the low-life (let’s call him Taro) stopped her with a hand. He chuckled darkly and leaned in close to blow in her ear. Fuu cringed, but at the same time she has an incongruous thought: she thought of the pinwheels she’d planted on the outside of the tea room. In her mind’s eye, she saw them blowing in the wind. They were just there to attract attention. She’d picked the colors with care: a nice innocent pink and a sunny yellow. 

“Stop, that tickles,” she managed to mutter with her lips squished up against the wall. 

“What’s that, ————?”

They heard a bench screech across the floor, the telltale sound of someone taking a seat. 

Taro-what’s-his-name momentarily let off the pressure, so Fuu took the opportunity to whip her head around and get a glimpse at the guy who’d thought it a good idea to walk into the tea room in the middle of a mass exodus. 

  
_**A broken pair of thin-wire spectacles.** _

* * *

A second stranger appeared in the doorway. It was at this point that Fuu was really truly saved, but not because either of the strangers came to her rescue. 

Instead, Taro’s two friends turned their attention to their new mark, who quickly dispatched them. Fuu felt Taro’s hands tremble even as they reached for her breasts. Impatiently, she exhaled out her nose.

The second stranger was dressed like he belonged two eras back, all official samurai attire. The outfit explained the bloodstains on his sleeves. Fifteen years ago, samurai had been forbidden from carrying swords. This man wore them proudly. His entire iconography stood out all the more because he was wearing a pair of very foreign glass spectacles. 

“Yo!” 

The first stranger, the tough who moved like a rooster with its chest puffed out and its head cut off, suddenly whipped himself right between Taro and the samurai. 

“Don’t waste your time on that jack,” the rooster-guy shot a thumb back at Taro. For a moment, Fuu forgot that her breast was being molested and stared wide-eyed at the rooster-guy’s wrist. 

He was branded. She saw he had matching blue rings tattooed around both wrists and ankles. A real tried-and-true criminal; not some wannabe like Taro. 

She slammed her geta down forcefully on one of Taro’s feet. He screamed at this latest injury and, finally registering the cooling bodies of his cronies on the ground, high-tailed it out the back of the tea room. Fuu was free. But she remained pinned to the spot. Fuu heard the sheen of their swords even before she registered that they’d been drawn. Her fate had been set in motion. 

  
**_Coins overflowing from a small embroidered coin purse. A sign that asks, “Heads or Tails?”_ **

* * *

There is some discrepancy about what happened next. If Fuu flipped the coin right there in the middle of their duel and asked the tough to call out “heads or tails,” or if the samurai was captured by the local militia for molesting his son (and “molesting” was the word used, to Fuu’s disgusted sense of irony) and that a great escape was planned, and then the coin toss came up except this time it was the samurai calling “tails”—

Well, the fact of the matter is, this fifteen-year-old orphaned daughter of a no-good samurai had the guts to ask two incredibly lethal men to accompany her. 

Accompany her on what? 

When pressed for an answer, she could have answered any number of ways. Because the tea room was wrecked and she lost her job. Because she was lonely. 

But she said it was because she was searching for someone. The Samurai Who Smells of Sunflowers. 


	4. The First Train

**_Three train ticket stubs._ **

* * *

Fuu learned that the tough’s name was Mugen and the samurai’s name was Jin. At the beginning, the three of them got along like cats and water. 

It bothered Fuu that Jin and Mugen weren’t always as gung-ho about her adventure as she was. She tried to stop being surprised at how often they disappeared, trying to hitch a ride to anywhere but where Fuu was going. 

But somehow three discrepancies were more unnoticeable than any one walking around on their lonesome. So an unchaperoned girl, a branded criminal, and an illegal ronin got from middle-of-nowhere Uji to the capitol of Edo. 

Of course, it helped that they went by train. Fuu would later remember the train as being both the literal and metaphorical turning point of their journey. It was when the three of them started to get along. Packed like sardines in the cheapest section their stolen train tickets could buy, they resorted to throwing dice. Fuu had learned some tricks in the back alley of the tea house, in between shifts. She cheated the boys out of their nonexistent money, and then got them kicked off the train when she angered one of the fellow passengers by cheating him out of his very existent money. 

There they were, on the side of the road still several kilometers from Edo, but at least they were a little richer. And Mugen gave her a look that made her stomach feel funny; made her see stars. And she thought she saw something rare, too: the hint of Jin’s smile.

“Not bad,” they each said, in their own way. She had impressed them. Dinner was on her that night. 


	5. Knives

_**A set of throwing knives; they’ve never gone a day dull.**_

* * *

In and out of Edo, they took their free time teaching Fuu how to defend herself. They were probably tired of rescuing her from any of the dozen little incidents that had already transpired. Nearly getting her eye gouged out during the train debacle had not been the first—or last—of these encounters. She was also almost mugged at the gate to Edo. In the city, she was getting dirty looks from some of the yellow-haired foreigners, and one of them got handsy. Enough was enough. 

So even though they ended up leaving Edo empty-handed, Fuu did get pretty decent at throwing knives. 


	6. Mother-of-Pearl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair Warning:  
> *Fuu will be exploring her sexuality in this fic. These are the mild first stages. Very coming-of-age like. Least that's the goal.

_**A lady’s mother-of-pearl comb. It still smells of a perfume they don’t make anymore.**_

* * *

If there was going to be a love sub-plot, Fuu thought it would have happened to her. Or at least happened to her first. Of all people, it was Jin who got smitten. 

From Edo, they started backpedaling towards the other side of Japan. It started on the bridge at Otani, Kioto. Fuu, Jin, and Mugen, packed elbow-to-elbow with a strangely mixed crowd. People of all classes passed on that bridge, artists eying the green-dotted landscape of the water, rich men finding new ways to check the purses concealed on their persons, farmers testing the stock of their buckwheat by slipping pieces of it between their yellowed teeth, and all the pretty ladies with their paper parasols. Fuu looked at them, trying to decide if she was supposed to envy their milky skin. She thought them lovely, but had never minded her own sunbrowned arms. 

One woman stood out in particular. Fuu couldn’t say why. Conventionally, the woman was not a great beauty, excepting her hair. It was long, blue-black, and pulled into so many loops it was a wonder it was all held in place by one comb. But the loveliest thing about her was her open expression. Eyes generous and welcoming, taking in everything around her. And her arms, as she moved them, held traces of sun. Ah. That’s why she stood out. Why did she carry a parasol if she didn’t care to work in the sun?

Fuu turned to Jin to ask him if he had anything to snack on. She did a double-take. Jin usually wore no expression at all, but now he had removed his glasses. His gaze remained hazily in front of him, and when Fuu followed it she saw how it landed on the parasol woman’s back. She turned to ask Mugen for something to eat instead and he told her to bug off. 

The bridge funneled into the overcrowded village. The sun was setting. At the ryokan Fuu saw the woman again. Jin volunteered to go scrounge up dinner. He never volunteered for anything. 

Fuu watched the love story unfold from the window of their room at the ryokan. There was a wedding going on in the village, which meant the village was effectively occupied to full capacity for the next three days. Rumors of skirmishes to the north of the village also kept people off the road; and the rain didn’t help, either. They ended up staying there for all three days. In Fuu’s memory, the stay felt endless. Like a summer day. 

Fuu’s not sure what Jin and the lady’s first meeting was. They met often, in small spaces. Carefully obscured yet out in the open. It continued to rain, which kept sensible people indoors. Jin said rain was no excuse not to train, and so he’d leave the ryokan each morning but leave his swords bundled up in their room. Fuu remained effectively glued to her spot at the window and chewed on her bottom lip. 

“Yo, you get off on that?” Mugen asked her. 

Yes, the other effect of Jin being gone was that Mugen and Fuu effectively ended up the only source of entertainment for each other. There wasn’t a brothel in a respectful little town like this to keep Mugen occupied (not that he had the money for one in the first place). 

“No!” Fuu would learn, slowly, that she didn’t always need to jump to her own defense. That most of what Mugen said was just to get a rise out of her (and that most of what he didn’t say would keep her up at night). But she hadn’t learned that lesson yet. 

She tried to put her worries into words, “It’s just—what if he decides to leave us?”

Mugen was silent a while. Fuu couldn’t see him; her back was still turned, her gaze not having left the window. Yet she felt something different, almost pregnant, in Mugen’s silence. 

“You ask me--” he said finally, “—you’re jealous,”

His tone had started out teasing, but ended sour, just a quick little note change but Fuu had caught it. She turned to him. Sometimes, Mugen seemed so much older than her, so worldly. But now he was just pouting like a petulant child. 

“Jin’s not my type,” she said. 

What she said obviously made Mugen pause, and suddenly Fuu didn’t know how to deal with it. She did the only thing she knew to diffuse it. She told a white lie. 

“Not that I wouldn’t mind if he asked after me,” she said, “In fact, I’m surprised he’d even look at that lady when I’m here,”

Mugen snorted. 

“Why would he bother with you? You’ve got inexperience written all over you,”

“You saying he could resist my virginal ways?”

Mugen snorted again, but this time it seemed genuine. She’d caught him off-guard, said something halfway funny. Why did the thought of making Mugen laugh make her stomach feel painfully pleasant? She turned her gaze back to the window but if anybody had looked up see her face there they might have wondered why she was grinning from ear to ear. 

She nearly jumped out of her skin when she felt a cool breath on said ear.

“Ugh, go away Mugen!”

“Kiss me,”

“Piss. Off.”

She was angry, yes, that’s what she was going with. It was anger that was making her heart pound like a taiko drum. 

“I mean it. I’m bored, anyway, and it’d be doing you a favor,”

“A favor?”

“Yeah, teach ya how we like it,”

“You creep——watching the grass grow would be more interesting than kissing you,”

“…Alright,”

Mugen turned to back to lounging in his corner and Fuu was left blinking. He sure had given up fast.

“I mean—” she stalled, “How hard can it be to kiss? That’s just a Western thing, anyway. Foreign fad, I heard,”

But she’d caught Jin and the woman kissing. It had looked….

“It ain’t hard,” Mugen said. He’d closed the distance between them again, and Fuu had hardly noticed. 

“But you gotta hone your instincts,”

He took her wrist, but Fuu didn’t feel trapped. She straightened her spine along the wall behind her, pushing back so she was out of view from the window. Mugen let the blinds down, which almost seemed considerate of him. Then he packed himself into the corner with her and grinned in a way that showed off his canines. 

It was a last-second decision, to close her eyes. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to close her eyes. She was almost afraid to not know when it was coming going to happen, but at the end the tension was too much. She squeezed her eyes tight and tried not to do the same with her lips. She almost didn’t notice his mouth on hers, because it couldn’t have been that soft. Their teeth clacked together, which she knew wasn’t supposed to happen, and she braced for his sarcastic remark. It didn’t come. He was a little rough as he took his hand off her wrist and used it to grab her chin and align her face better. The second kiss felt more practical, and Fuu tried to relax by telling herself that’s all this was: practice. She focused. Not on Mugen. On how her lips could fit against his. The corner of his mouth; the exchange of breath. It was nice. Like floating. It was nice not having her thoughts settle on a thousand different things, like if her arms were too brown or if her father had ever missed her or how many steps it was to Kioto, what they’d eat for dinner, how they’d afford dinner, what she would do when this journey was over, if Jin would leave, if Mugen would—. 

She pulled back, embarrassed at her sharp intake of breath. She hadn’t been aware of Mugen for several minutes now and couldn’t believe they’d been kissing that long. It was—obscene. She must seem like such a—. Oh, why is it that once she’d reached sixteen everything now seemed so acutely embarrassing and wretched? 

“Well, that’s one way to keep you quiet,” 

Fuu pulled a pin from her hair and arced it toward Mugen’s eye. He deflected it easily enough. 

They each returned to their respective sides of the room. Like nothing was different at all. Probably it wasn’t. Not for Mugen, surely. But Fuu hadn’t missed how his lips had just briefly chased hers when she’d pulled back. She’d pull that memory out now and then and it would warm her all over. 

  
That night it rained, just like it had every night since they’d come to town. Fuu insisted on staying up, keeping the lantern going for when Jin would come back. Mugen whined but stayed up with her. She probably thought seven times in one hour to ask him about kissing her again, but she didn’t dare. And as the night dragged on, Fuu started to worry more and more about Jin. 

She was leaning, oh so sleepily, oh so dangerously, over the lantern, half-a-mind to blow it out. The rain was lulling her to sleep. Mugen’s arm had somehow ended up near her thigh, and the warmth was good as any blanket. She was ready for sleep.

Then a tall dark figure, straw hat dripping with rain, slid the shoji screen open. He stood at the entrance, not bothering to take off his shoes or his wet clothes. A puddle formed at his feet. 

Even Mugen knew not to say anything. 

“You’ll catch your death,” Fuu said in a small voice. She was very tired. Jin let her take off his straw shawl, the straw hat. He finally undid his shoes and tabi himself. 

“Let’s leave in the morning,” Jin said. 

“Fine by me,” Mugen said, crossing his arms behind his head. He held them there a moment, looking down at Jin, as though waiting for an explanation. None came. They were all too tired and curled up into sleep, sleeping in closer proximity than usual. They’d all reason it was because of the damp chill, because of the odd hour. 

And despite getting hardly any sleep, they all woke up at the crack of dawn, rolled up their meager possessions, and put feet to road again. 

Fuu dragged all that morning. She was just so tired. They kept taking stops; Fuu would look back at the village, which still sprawled on the horizon. It looked like the wedding was finally underway. They were making such slow progress that Fuu could see the streamers in the wind, practically hear the chants and bells at the Shinto shrine. 

Jin had left the place so easily. Fuu felt she’d learned something. Kissing didn’t mean a thing. It hadn’t meant anything between her and Mugen; her first kiss hadn’t meant anything to him at all. It hadn’t been some symbol of love and devotion between Jin and his mysterious woman, either. Kissing didn’t mean anything. These little things between men and women—diversions. After all, her father had left the mother of his child; they’d probably kissed thousands of times. No matter how much of a firework show Fuu felt in her chest, what she felt was never enough. It was easy for men to leave women. It was easy for people to leave people. 

She was sullen at dinner, but of course neither of the boys asked why. They were never considerate like that. They barely even talked to each other, just passed bits of fresh-caught fish and stolen miso between them. Fuu stirred her own food together, over and over, till it looked like a nondescript soup of questionable origins. She couldn’t taste anything, but she was embarrassed that she still remembered the taste of Mugen’s lips. He tasted like chewing tobacco, and iron, and something sweet. 

“I thought you liked her!” she finally exclaimed, apropos of nothing. 

Jin set his chopsticks down. In a practiced, graceful movement. Like he did everything. It’s like samurai trained for every possible circumstance in life so they were never caught unawares. Stoicism applied to every situation. But Fuu kept her fiery gaze on him and didn’t relent. Mugen just watched. 

“That wedding everyone was talking about?” Jin said. He removed his glasses. He didn’t need to clean them, but he did. He didn’t even need the glasses; Fuu had learned early in their journey they were fake moons of glass. Just an affectation. But he removed the glasses and cleaned them nonetheless. 

“She got married today,” Jin continued, and then continued like this news was secondhand and applied to somebody else, “Family debts. She told me everything from the get go. A farmer’s girl like that—it was a good match,”

“If she was getting married—” Fuu was experiencing all that wretched teenage embarrassment again, feeling out of her element and like she still needed to be on the defense, “—why, why did she k-kiss you?”

Jin’s expression actually faltered for a moment. Fuu thought it was a look of pain. But how could she know? She’d seen him take a blade in hand and push it back while hot blood dripped down his palm. She didn’t think anything could hurt Jin. Just as quickly as his expression faltered, it smoothed back into its usual zen mask. He put his glasses back on. 

“We were just passing through, Fuu,” Jin had never said her name out loud before, “I guess I was taking advantage of her. At the end of the day, we’re still of different castes. At least I didn’t have to pay her—”

Fuu slapped him and quickly turned heels and ran away. Like a child. She knew that, that she was being childish. But it had felt so right. How could Jin call that woman with the lovely open eyes a whore just because he was embarrassed of where she came from, because he was embarrassed that her arms were sun-bronzed?

Fuu came back on her own. Mugen perked up first, but Jin remained silent and calm. Fuu apologized. But Jin apologized too. 

That night the three of them slept close. But it really was cold that time of year. It was only going to get colder, as they neared the end of summer and the early chill winds dogged at their heels. If they slept closer for the remainder of their journey, it was because it was practical. And if, in the moonlight, Fuu sometimes caught Jin tracing his nail over the teeth of a lady’s perfumed comb and bringing it to his lips, she never told a soul. Sometimes she did that herself, bringing her tanto out and placing a kiss there. For practice. She’d learned that she liked things that could cut her if she wasn’t careful. 


	7. Rosary

_**A wooden rosary**_. 

* * *

As they continued west, they met a kindly foreigner.

The foreigner was tonsured, almost like a proper samurai, and wore a brown, uncomfortable-looking robe. He spoke passable Japanese, though he and Mugen got along in a language neither Jin nor Fuu knew, something Mugen had picked up in the overseas travels he never talked about. Fuu got the same feeling talking with the foreigner as she did when she was in the presence of a Buddhist monk or Shinto priestess. A sense of purpose, of a peace that could exist outside the day-to-day concerns of hunger and finding a samurai who smelled of sunflowers. 

“Sunflowers!” the kind foreigner had exclaimed, “I know them! I was surprised to see a large field of them not so far from here,”

And Fuu, her mouth gone dry, hastily asked for the man to mark the place on their map. 

The man gave Fuu a strange wooden necklace. She felt like she had seen something like it before; in a secret pressed between her father’s hands and her mother’s hands. A memory locked away in childhood, obscured by a child’s limited understanding. She shook off the feeling. The man explained she could use the necklace for prayer. 

“It’s like a japamala,” Jin said, after they’d parted ways with the man. She nodded; made sense. She tied the wooden rosary around her wrist, twice, three times, so it fit. She recalled her father wear something like this, wearing it like Jin wore his mala beads. No wonder she’d thought of her father when she’d first caught glimpse of Jin. 


	8. Photograph

_**A sepia photograph. Somebody got zealous and attempted to paint over the background (this was a popular thing to do at one time). Though the three figures in the foreground remain bleached of color, they pop out from a background sea of yellow, yellow sunflowers**_. 

* * *

During their journey, the three of them each saw something for the first time. 

Fuu saw the sea. She couldn’t remember the last time she'd jumped at something so quickly. When she finally got to the water she didn’t know what to do with it. She reached down to touch it, curious what the white froth would feel like. She lifted a palmful to her mouth. She looked over her shoulder.

“It really _is_ salty!”

Mugen licked his lips as though he could taste salt there himself. 

Then——he began running a straight and uncompromising line towards Fuu, who startled like a deer and remained frozen until her reflexes kicked in and she began running. Only she’d never tread water like this before and didn’t count on running so slow. Mugen caught up with her in no time and began a tidal war. Fuu retaliated. Soon they were both completely soaked. Jin watched on, nonplussed. He tried not to react when Fuu and Mugen turned around and pierced him with the same intentional glance. For Jin, who had only ever seen the ocean as a proverb (he saw everything as an extension of his training and little else), finally being splashed into submission by both Mugen and Fuu was both annoying and exhilarating. 

They continued following the coastline on the way to see the kind foreigner’s sunflowers. According to the marks on their map, they were in the general vicinity. Fuu’s heart would start pounding every time they began to round a corner—thinking she’d see that same crest of sunflowers that existed in her childhood memories. Those nights she dreamed vivid, lucid dreams. She moved through the sunflower fields like they really were an ocean, the waters dragging at her limbs and exaggerating her movements. No matter how she ran, she couldn’t get any closer to the figure in the distance. 

She awoke one night to find her neck was damp with sweat and Mugen’s face nearby. She must have still been dreaming as she reached out and took Mugen’s hand. He’d flinched.

“What’s that?” Fuu asked. The sun was just peaking over Mugen’s shoulder, bathing their campsite in weak morning light. No getting back to sleep, then. But Fuu was referring to a strange shape crumpled up just on the outskirts of their camp. 

“Oh yeah,” Mugen no longer seemed dumbfounded by their handholding, “Caught an intruder last night,”

Fuu gasped. But then found that she wasn’t very frightened. It could have been because she was still holding hands with Mugen, or because she’d finally gotten a good look at the intruder. 

“He doesn’t look very…intrudery,” Fuu said. Even from a distance she could see that the man was small, with a babyish face, and a foreigner’s fancy trousers and restricting hakama (’coat,’ she had heard the term ‘coat’ used).

Just then Jin returned from his morning routine. Since they’d been hugging the coast, he and Mugen had started shaving down by the ocean. Well, Mugen’s version of shaving was haphazard, but Jin was precise with his grooming. Fuu had tried a thousand times to imagine what Jin would look like with facial hair, but every time the imaginary whiskers would fall from his face like sad little pine needles. It simply didn’t fit his character. Which is why Fuu laughed when he returned that morning, because he had missed a spot—right on the corner of his jaw. 

“Shameful that I’m allowing my lack of sleep to affect me like this,” he said stonily, which only made Fuu turn away to hide her second peal of laughter, except that caused her to exchange looks with Mugen and then they both burst out laughing. 

It woke the intruder. 

“Ugh, my—” he began, and he might have been sensible and finished that thought with ‘my head’ or ‘my ribs’ or ‘my back,’ all of which were in poor shape, but the word that came to mind was, “—my camera!”

“Ka-me-ra?” Fuu repeated. 

“You mean this?” Jin held up a strange box with a small plane of glass and bit of cloth tied to it. The intruder made a strangled sound of relief. 

“Oh, it doesn’t look broken!” he exclaimed. His attempt to sit up was admirable, but Fuu could tell he was in need of a little patching up. Sighing, she went to go gather what supplies they had. As she began bandaging the man’s head and ribs (the rest of him would be fine), Mugen embellished last night’s tale. Apparently the man had been skulking around in the woods, hulking a strange box around (Mugen’s first thought had been explosions, and Jin’s had been the severed head of an enemy, and both answers really were strangely apt examples of their distinct yet similarly violent personalities). Of course, neither of their guesses were correct. 

Sheepishly, the Japanese man in the foreigner’s suit explained what a camera was. 

“Oh, for photographs!” Both Jin and Fuu, who had run around in sophisticated circles at some point in their lives, had seen photographs before. Mugen hadn’t. He demanded to see one. The man seemed reluctant to take out his secret stash, probably afraid this grubby-handed stranger would smudge them, but for his safety he relented. Mugen did smudge the photograph some, but he quickly adjusted himself as he took a closer look at the photo. 

“Aiyee,” he said softly, almost reverently. Fuu had never heard him use that tone before. 

“It captures people’s souls,” Mugen said. He averted his gaze, glaring at the sky, as he handed the photo back to the man. Fuu looked at Mugen, feeling tender. She wondered where he’d grown up, what stories had shaped him. 

“Superstition,” Jin snorted prettily, earning a glare from Mugen. Fuu sometimes forgot they were sworn rivals. 

Convinced that the intruder wasn’t an intruder, the man was then allowed to introduce himself.

“Motonori Andou,” he said, with a perfectly Japanese bow, though he added, “But, please, call me Andou. It’s the Western thing to do,”

When they told Andou they were on the hunt for sunflowers, he perked up right away. 

“I can show you!”

And that made the morning short. 

Fuu’s heart pounded the entire time. 

“I came here because I heard a story,” Andou said, when Fuu had asked him what brought him out in this part of Japan, and so strangely dressed for travel, “Of a Japanese man with foreign tendencies, planting an entire field of sunflowers. Oh, this was some years ago, that’s how the sunflowers are so tall now. It’s all because of the time of year. The time for sunflowers is late summer. We’re a little late, but when I saw them earlier this week they were still proud and tall,”

“Who was this man who planted the flowers?” Fuu asked. 

“Scion of a noble family, last I heard,” Andou, “I can relate—except for being anywhere near noble,”

He laughed at himself. 

“He had foreign tendencies? Do you know anything else about him?”

“I don’t know what was foreign about him per se. Maybe it was just that he loved a foreign flower so?”

Fuu felt floaty with both hope and despair. Needing to know more, yet still knowing more than she did before. She didn’t have to be disappointed long; around that next corner the field came into view. 

For the second time that day Fuu’s fingers brushed against Mugen’s knuckles. She stood between both him and Jin, and it was Jin’s sleeve she tugged. He felt safer, somehow, more of an anchor to ground her feet.

“Oh, look!” she said. She breathed in deep, “I told you! I told you that sunflowers have a smell. It smells like—warmth, and, and seeds, and summer and autumn rolled into one,”

“Hey, I _have_ seen these before,” Mugen mumbled, “Always called it somethin’ else. _Girassol_. But never seen ‘em as tall as these,”

It was Jin who saw the sunflowers for the first time. He seemed curious, when they went to stand by the sunflowers and he found himself face-to-face with one, so to speak. 

“Aesthetic,” he said, though he seemed at a loss for words. 

“Hey!” Mugen called after Fuu, but she didn’t heed him. She'd begun walking through the sunflowers. Slowly, without any sense of direction. But just being surrounded by them again——she once more floated within hope and despair. It reminded her of her daydreams and her nightmares. It reminded her of her father. 

She walked for sometime till she heard a loud, ungraceful rustle behind her. She startled when she heard the _shing_ of a blade. She turned to see Mugen thwacking his way through the stalks. She screamed. 

“Stop it! Stop it, Mugen!”

“You didn’t make it easy to run after ya!” he retorted. Then he saw the tears in her eyes. He sighed, and held out one of the sunflower heads. 

“They’re starting to wilt, ya know. It’s just their time,” he said. When she still remained wobbly-eyed, he plucked a seed from the flower's center and popped it in her mouth. 

“Found out they make a good snack,” he said. 

Fuu blinked. The taste of Mugen’s fingers; the shock of seeing her beloved flowers defiled; realizing that this was the way of the world; being rescued from her sadness; being comforted by Mugen, of all people, who was perhaps the one person she desired to be comforted by the most, after her father. She burst into tears of laughter. 

They emerged from the sunflower field to find that Andou had his camera set up. 

“I tried taking photos of the field before,” Andou said, in his usual sheepish way, “They didn’t come out right. I think what’s missing is——people,”

It took quite a bit of convincing to get Mugen to agree to pose in the photo, and he finally agreed if he could hold one of the sunflowers in front of his face. To protect his soul, of course.

And by the time they’d held for the pose, Mugen had decided to block Jin’s face with another freakishly tall sunflower, so that the end result was that Fuu looked like a serene young woman flanked by two shadowy men obscured by the field of flowers behind them. Fuu would look at that photograph in her later years (it took her several decades to track it down) and think how all of her loved ones seemed destined to be swallowed up by that strange foreign beauty at some point or another.

So Fuu knew that the sea was salt, and Mugen attempted to guard his soul, and Jin found beauty in something he could not bend to the submission of the Harajuku. It was probably the freest they felt on their entire journey.


	9. Tea Set

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are y'all ready for a history lesson?!
> 
> I don't know why I do this. Most of the fanfic I read is fluffy or angsty emotional goodness, or like, actual romance, but I give you guys this. I hope you find it interesting, haha. 
> 
> Fair warnings. I'm not using archive warnings or ratings on this piece because I honestly think that maturity is different for everyone. There are, however, certain things that I stumbled upon when I was young and naive to the world of fanfic, and I don't wanna be that person to some of my readers. So I'm going back and adding warnings for each chapter, if they apply, and here are the warnings for this chapter:
> 
> *Mentions of suicide  
> *Mentions of implied sexual abuse  
> *Unhappy childhoods  
> *Angst, if that wasn't apparent
> 
> But it's not all angst! I'm a G.K. Chesterton-style Realist at heart. And there are more romancey things to come (but also some heavy topics). Thank you for all the kudos, comments, and engagement. 
> 
> Anyways, last things last, I took liberty with each character's background. I think they still fit, but seeing as this is an AU and I like overspeculation, here's my spin on Meiji-Era Jin, Mugen, and Fuu growing up.

PART TWO: TSUKUMOGAMI FOR PLAYING HOUSE

* * *

**_Three tea cups sit side-by-side. One is painted with sakura petals, one with quicksilver fish, one blazoned with splashes of red in the Okinawan style_**.

* * *

  
In 1868, Jin’s inheritance was destroyed. He had only just been born; his mother, who some months earlier would have swallowed back tears of joy at the news of a son, cried when she learned she had given her husband a boy. Bitter was the taste of having wine without a cup. 

The feudal domains were abolished in 1871. Rather than cutting the Tokugawa shogunate at its roots, they first denied it water. It would take less than a lifetime to see the tree wither and fall. At the abolishing of the _han_ , Jin’s mother hung herself from that tree while it still stood. Jin was not yet old enough to remember her face.

It is an error to think that the Japanese see suicide as something courageous. Suicide has always been for the weak; Jin’s father told him this. Jin’s father certainly would not go down without a fight. 

Jin’s entire life had been a fighting stance. If the Tokugawa had never gotten fat and complacent and cruel, if the Tokugawa had continued and Japan had never entertained the idea of sending itself glittering before the modern world, Jin’s life really would not have been much different. The way of the samurai was a lifelong stance. Jin had the same disease his mother had——he was old before his time, he lived others’ lives. He knew he had to live his mother’s, for instance, as well as his father’s. He was an only child, and soon one of the only samurai. 

Japan did not change rapidly or step-by-step. Samurai were not turned out on their ears. Perhaps it would have been better than they were. Yet Jin learned much from his father, watching him circumvent and bow but never break as he was slowly stripped of his samurai privileges. In 1876, the wearing of swords was prohibited. 

His father wasn’t killed at the battle of the Kumamoto castle, but he came back different. Jin wasn’t yet ten as the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion swirled around him. When his father returned with a shoulder that would never quite heal, Jin knew that his childhood was over. His father needed his good, young, untested shoulders to bear the family name. 

Jin learned that he enjoyed getting hurt. It had never seemed right, listening to stories of grand stoicism and watching his father and the other men of the clan bear scars and sweat and ruined bones, to know the great weight his mother must have carried, to see the world go to bloody shambles around him, while Jin himself remained relatively untouched. When he finally earned his first bruise in a fight, part of him was greatly relieved. When his father reprimanded him for allowing himself to get a finger broken, Jin felt lighter still on the inside. Pain relieved that terrible weight he had no name for, a weight he hadn’t been aware of until he encountered its cure. 

Perhaps it was guilt. His birth had made his mother unhappy. Perhaps it was shame. It was no longer honorable to be a samurai. The citizens who had once looked to his family for protection now looked at their passing with a mix of fear and contempt. Murderers, rapists, _thugs_. A secret part of Jin feared that the accusations in their eyes were true. But every time he took a hit for them, for samurai, for Nihon, that guilt and shame lifted. Each time he bled, he felt that much closer to his true inheritance. The more he fought, the more he kept this way of life alive. Kept them all alive. 

* * *

In 1879, Japan annexed the Ryukyu Islands. Not that mainland hadn’t always been a constant thorn in their side anyway. For Mugen, it was the first certain, stamped thing in his life. The first thing that had a date. He didn’t know his birthday, the year he was born, the name his mother might have given him. He picked all those out himself. But he hadn’t known he’d been a Ryukyuan until that was taken from him. 

He’d never even liked his own people, but an enemy of an enemy is a friend. Mugen did not like to lose, and he sure as hell wouldn’t lose his country pride (however little he cared for it). He learned how to fight with whatever was nearby: a stone, a gun, a machete, a fukugi tree branch, finally settling on a double-edged tsurugi with a two-prong hilt. That sword was the first thing he’d ever felt precious over. Contrary to the rumors spread amongst the gang he fell into, Mugen hadn’t killed anybody over the sword. His finding of it had been a secret. There was treasure hidden in the caves off the Ryukyu Islands—a treasure that only Mugen and two others knew about. 

Mukuro and his sister Kohza were the first companions Mugen ever put up with. Both were a fixture of his childhood. Mukuro had always been bigger, meaner, bloodier. Mugen learned a lot from him, but he never scraped and slobbered around him like the rest of the gang did. Mugen might have lost every fight he challenged Mukuro to, but only because Mukuro cheated. 

Kohza was different. First pair of tits he ever felt, though he never had his way with her. Mugen’ first time hadn’t been anything special, though of course you never forgot your first time (Mugen wished he could—he searched desperately in every brothel so that, maybe some day, he would). But he never tried that with Kohza. It could have been the way Kohza’s large, shallow slate eyes looked at him, like they were trying to drown him, or the way Mukuro looked at Kohza. Mugen did not feel precious about Kohza, but he didn't like the way Mukuro looked at her at all. He stuck around, got between them, served as a distraction. Maybe it gave Kohza the wrong idea. Either way, Mugen lived by his gut, and his gut told him that Kohza wasn't his girl but she still didn't deserve _that._

Like Kohza, Mugen had never known a touch he’d liked. When he had been smaller, before he had a stone or his tsurugi, he’d been powerless at the greedy, desperate hands of those around him. Men, women, didn’t matter. Difference was——Mugen was destined to grow strong and tall and angry. Kohza would always be a woman, too soft for the penal colony they called home but too dark and different for the Yamato invaders. 

Perhaps Kohza was the first person he’d ever had compassion on. But he’d never felt strongly for anything but living to see another day. Everything and everyone else just passed for fun, just passed the time. 

Despite Mukuro, Mugen wouldn’t have left it if his hand hadn’t been forced. By Mukuro himself, of all people. 

Mugen still remembered it: a treasure map, a line of dead men, blood on his sword, Mukuro’s gun at his back. He’d sworn revenge. He still remembered where to find it, that X-marks-the-spot. His tsurugi was proof that, even if Mukuro had betrayed him, Mugen had still looted that sword from that two-bit pirate’s treasure trove. Mugen would never part with it. They could take it over his dead body. 

* * *

In 1889, Fuu, being the last of her kin, abandoned the family mansion. Her father’s family had never been eminent samurai; they had no claim to castles. Her entire childhood Fuu had seen such castles dismantled, stone by stone, and others left whole, restored into public schools and parks and government buildings. Her family’s land now belonged to God himself, to _kokka_ , the State, the Emperor.

Her mother’s cousin would take her in, provide her a job. A respectable teahouse, where respectable clients frequented. A chance to find a husband in one of those respectable clients. A chance to eat and drink and sleep, unmolested, and no longer alone. 

Fuu had always assumed her father was killed. That he had left their family to either fight for their samurai honor or to take _kokka_ ’s wrath with him. Fuu listened intently for news of samurai rebellions or ronin escapades or glimpses of foreign flowers. Her father loved sunflowers. Fuu had never even known they weren’t native to Japan. She had grown up with them as some children grow up with the sea or the snow. She knew no different, and was surprised that not seeing them everyday sometimes made her feel more lonely than she had felt even in that big mansion all by herself. It was one reason, probably, that she had planted pinwheels outside the teahouse. She bought ones with multiple layers because they reminded her of her father’s fields. 

It was one of the respectable clients that told Fuu that her father was alive. Not so much directly to Fuu. She only overheard the conversation as she refilled their tea cups. The client was a well-traveled merchant, and he mentioned he’d made a surprisingly tidy profit on selling sunflower-themed items. Sunflower-printed kimono, pressed sunflower booklets, sunflower seed oil, bags of sunflower seeds. 

“Got a _shizoku_ as one of my primary carriers, if you’ll believe it,” the merchant told his companions. 

“I can believe it,” replied a long-nosed companion, “Got one working in my stables,”

“And I see too many of them sleeping on the streets,” said the other, the one who consistently wore Japanese clothing instead of Western suits. 

_Shizoku_ , Fuu thought. A former samurai. It could very well be a coincidence. 

“I’d like a bag of sunflower seeds,” Fuu said, when she brought the men some complementary dumplings. The merchant looked at the generous plate and seemed to think it was a fair deal. He produced a small bag from his coat.

Fuu had only thought to plant one or three out in the back. Surely her mother’s cousin wouldn’t mind. But Fuu stopped short as she pulled on the string of the sack.

Hanging from the string was a small _netsuke_. Cheap, wooden, and quickly-made, but Fuu recognized it. She carried a much more carefully crafted version on her _tanto_ : her only gift from her father. 

She quickly hid the _netsuke_ in her fist; like it was a secret. Every day since she felt something purposeful in her walk. Around every corner she thought she’d see—not his face, she couldn’t remember that face, but certainly she’d notice his back. It was like no other’s. He’d worn their clan’s seal, but around his neck he’d worn a strange necklace. His shoulders weren’t like Fuu’s. They were wide and male, straight and disciplined. Japan should be honored to be represented by those shoulders. 

And on the wind, she’d catch the ghost of his scent. Father. He smelled like the change in seasons, like a growing field, like a father should. A safe, strong, homey smell. A scent that brought tears to Fuu’s eyes. 

* * *

* * *

* * *

“Oi!”

Mugen’s hands wafted through the steam, through Fuu’s blurry vision. She blinked back her nostalgia. 

The three of them had been enjoying a rare companionable silence. They each sat, monk-like, in front of their tea cups. The teahouse was the only attraction on an otherwise deserted bit of road. A rare glimpse of Japan, untouched by the Meiji Restoration. The owner had never even seen eyeglasses, and had insisted on holding on to Jin’s during their stay. Jin, who had also been absorbed in his thoughts, now seemed to remember this. He looked long-sufferingly at the old proprietress. 

Fuu sipped her tea. A slight hint of fruit. Just as she liked it. She gazed at her companions. Mugen had ordered plain black tea, bitter to the last dregs. Jin had chosen green. 

It was the tea cups that fascinated her. She’d like to own a set like this, one day. 

Jin and Mugen had finished their cups in one fell swoop, and had sat there contemplating the tea leaves like fortune tellers. Fuu wondered what they’d been thinking. It struck her in that moment that she knew so little about her companions. 

She sighed as she reached for the coin purse. Even eating was a luxury they could ill-afford. The teahouse didn’t have much beyond the standard dumplings, and they’d split the small plate three ways. Fuu took another quick sip of tea so she could delay the growl she felt creeping in her stomach. 

But the old woman rejected the coin. 

“I’ll take these,” she said, now pointing at the glasses on her face. 

Fuu and Mugen turned to look at Jin, who took a long while to think about this. 

“Three more plates of dumplings,” he said, “One for each of us,”

The old woman, too, took a long while to think about this. 

“Deal.”

(And later, years later, Fuu revisited that street. It was no longer untouched by the modern era, but it was famous for selling old-style yonomi teacups, hand-painted and dripping in a nostalgia money quickly would not be able to buy. Fuu commissioned a custom set).


	10. Kiribi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted something nice, easy, cliche, and shippy after the last few chapters. It actually became a little more. 
> 
> Warnings for:
> 
> *sexual innuendo, I guess. More like sexual awakening. Ugh. This is why I hate tagging--it's like spoilers, but without context. It's PG-13 coming-of-age type stuff.

**_A kiribi set that looks like it has started a thousand fires. Before lighters, this was a simple wooden disk with a metal edge. When struck against rock, it could spark a flame. It somehow became a symbol of traveling mercies for a wife to strike a kiribi at her husband's departure._ **

* * *

“Don’t look now, but we’re being followed.”

Fuu fought against her instant reaction to turn her head, just slightly, in Mugen’s direction. He continued walking on her right. Pressed closer than normal. Silently, Jin came up on her left, pressed nearly as close. 

“On the count of three—” Mugen began. 

“Huh?” Fuu still felt shocked, hairs tingling on the back of her neck. 

“Two—” Jin said. Fuu turned to him. Whiplash. 

“One!” Mugen shouted, and bolted to the right. Just as quickly but silently, Jin flew off to the left. 

Leaving Fuu right smack dab in the middle of the road. 

She began running furiously forward. Just the other day Mugen had chucked out her old, stylish geta (against her will and without her knowledge) and replaced it with these more common, run-down, practical ones. Fuu hadn’t asked where he’d got them. She’d been both angry and touched. She tried not to make too much of it. 

But all the geta helped her do now was run faster and run straight out in the open. She knew this was wrong, somehow, but her body was only capable of behaving mechanically. Her mind was in a fury of indecision. She was trying to listen for any sound of pursuit behind her, but she couldn’t over the sound of Mugen cursing. 

“Fuu, get off the road!” he yelled, somewhere from her right. Impossibly far away. She started veering off in his direction. She didn’t expect to run into him so soon. Her cheek was pushed up against his collarbone, and his elbow came down—sharp—on her shoulder blade. Then it was hard to tell which was tree branch and which was human limb. One of them had lost their balance and now both of them were tumbling down a hill strewn with bushes and trees perfect for breaking their fall and the tenderest spots of exposed skin. 

Fuu rolled up with a freshly bleeding shin and the taste of iron in her mouth, but she’d been through worse. Adrenaline cut through any discomfort she might have otherwise felt. 

“Mugen?” 

His momentum had carried him further, and she saw his body tossed halfway into a ravine at the bottom of the hill. She looked uphill to see any sign of their mystery pursuers, but seeing none, she rushed the rest of the way to the ravine. 

Mugen’s body was slightly inverted, one shoulder still on the bank and one dipped into the ravine, with his head hanging from his neck and his hair all wet. Fuu shook some sense into him. Then tried to shake some sense into herself. Mugen looked like somebody else with his hair wet. It made Fuu’s stomach feel funny. She wasn’t so naive as to what that was anymore. She’d shared her first kiss with the man, for heaven’s sake. He was older than her, lean and strong and in his prime. And she knows her body had betrayed her for the second time that night, following after Mugen like a little lost lamb. Like she hadn’t a lick of common sense. Now she was staring at him like he was her dinner instead of her friend. 

She was a little ashamed of herself. She would have been more ashamed if she’d had the time for it. She was already a few paces down the ravine, looking for a way to cross it and expecting Mugen to not be far behind. 

“How are we going to meet back up with Jin?” she whispered, more loudly than she had intended. 

“He’s a big guy,” Mugen said, but he wasn’t following Fuu’s lead. She muttered under her breath and turned around. He wanted to go down the other side of the ravine, in the direction they’d just come. 

“We’ll worry about in the morning,” Mugen said. 

“Do you plan on walking all night?” Fuu asked. 

“I saw who was followin’ us. Let’s just get shelter,”

Something about the way Mugen said that sent a chill down her spine. She pressed a little closer to Mugen’s heels, feeling more vulnerable than self-conscious. 

“Um,” she began, “Who’s following us?” 

“Same guys who been on our tail since Kioto,”

“Since Kioto?”

“Me and Jin been keepin’ an eye out. Tonight’s the closest they’ve gotten. Felt like they were plannin’ an ambush,”

“You and Jin have known about this? More importantly, why would anybody be following us? Who is following us?”

“It ain’t exactly legal to be carryin’ swords around. But if was the imperials, they woulda just made our arrest quick and in the open. These guys have been keeping tabs on us for almost two weeks now. Me and Jin both got enemies for days, so we’re still takin’ bets on who exactly it is. We’ll find out when we see which one of us they follow. Want in on the bet?”

Fuu made to give him a punch, half exasperated and half intended, but Mugen didn’t actually dodge it. He hadn’t dodged because she posed absolutely no threat to his physical being, and while that should have comforted Fuu, now that they were off the road and being pursued by God-knows-who, the shock of touching him was too much. Her nerves were already on end. 

Then, as an answer to Fuu’s unspoken prayer, they saw the dark outline of a woodman’s shack. 

The shack looked like it had been abandoned. Fuu had tried her best to clean the floor so they each had enough space to sleep that night. Without saying anything, Mugen settled himself in front of the entrance.

There were a few curiosities left by the previous owner. Fuu found books written in both Japanese and western script, a dull axe, some coin (which, being the treasurer of their trio, she pocketed quickly before Mugen could find it), and a kiribi set. 

Mugen used his happi to cover up the one makeshift window that had been cut into the shack. They needed a fire, just a little bit of warmth, but they weren’t about to risk being seen. Fuu had learned a lot on their journey, and one of the most useful was how to quickly put up a fire. The kiribi helped. 

“Or maybe those guys are after you,” Mugen said out of nowhere.

“Huh?” Fuu put all her effort into trying to get the flames to stick and didn’t spare a glance at Mugen. 

“I mean, I dunno who this sunflower guy is. He’s a samurai, and people don’t like them anymore. Just who exactly is this guy we’re lookin’ for, Fuu?”

He said her name out loud so seldom that Fuu found it even harder to concentrate on her task. This private type of conversation was also a rare, unnerving thing. Everything about this night seemed intent to frazzle her. 

When she didn’t say anything, Mugen spoke again. “Well, what is it? Do you love ‘im or do you hate ‘im?”

“What does it matter?” Fuu snapped, “The point is, I need to find him!”

The fire had caught. 

“In my experience,” Mugen said, “Love ‘em or hate ‘em, ends up the same way,”

She wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by that, but he was in one of those modes where he seemed to know so much more than her, so Fuu took his words to heart. She was desperate to say something, anything, but nothing came to mind. She coaxed the fire a little more till she was convinced it wouldn’t sputter out any time soon. 

“Aight,” Mugen said, after having lazily watched her take care of the fire all by herself, “I’mma check outside one more time,”

With only the slightest thought, Fuu brought her kiribi together and rubbed them together, watching the sparks fly in Mugen’s eyes. It was so obviously a prank she was startled by the serious glint in his eye. Mugen was never serious. 

“What, you my wife or somethin’?”

After he left she cradled her hand between her breasts and waited for her heartbeat to return to normal. After once it did, the shroud of sleepiness was heavier than ever. When Mugen returned, he found her already curled up and dreaming. 

On the water, Fuu and Mugen were laughing like they had the day Fuu saw the ocean for the first time. She crawled more and more into her own body until she was finally aware of it: her heartbeat, her long wet hair, her salted skin, her center. She was being lifted. By the tides, of course, but then it’s Mugen’s arms at her waist. They were both just floating in the water, effortlessly, but she saw sparks in his eyes. As the wave sank, so did his arms. When she was finally flush with his chest, she snaked her arms around the middle of his back. Her hands traveled up and over his shoulder blades. Beautiful. She’s not sure if she’s saying that to him or if he’s saying that to her. 

Fuu’s own body felt like a wave. She’d never felt like this before. It cascaded through her, deep and warm, and she was aware of her center again. An involuntary movement traveled through her, till Fuu was suddenly awake and she was aware of her own body rather than her dream. She’d never felt so loose before, and she bucked her hips once, twice, three times before she realized what she was doing. 

She froze, mortified. 

She was afraid to open her eyes. She knew Mugen was in the room with her. She knew what she’d been feeling now. She’d never felt that way before, yet, she knew. 

She finally opened her eyes. It was still dark, to her relief. She could make out Mugen’s outline in the dark. She didn’t start breathing normally till she heard him mumble in his sleep. 

Fuu turned over so her back was facing him, and curled her legs into herself. She was having trouble remembering what that pleasant feeling had felt like, and wished she could. She brought her fingers up to her mouth. She didn’t know how to feel. Guilty? Dirty? Curious? She mostly felt sleepy, and decided to fall back into what was this time a dreamless sleep. 

She woke up a second time to Mugen pinching her nose. 

“Your snores were waking the dead,” he whispered harshly. 

As usual, her punch was ineffective. 

He moved his hand from her nose to her mouth and pressed down close to her. Fuu’s eyes widened. It wasn’t morning. It wasn’t night. The light creeping in was the thick gauzy blue that creeps along when people are still supposed to be sleeping but the world is just starting to wake up. Mugen gave her a warning look and Fuu settled down. It was then she heard it. The unmistakable drag of footsteps in dry leaves. 

They lay there, unmoving, unblinking, almost unbreathing. The footsteps circled the shack. They were so quiet that the sound of them could have been masked by the slightest gust of wind. 

“Wait—” Mugen’s head turned up, “That sound. Hear it? Sounds like that bracelet that jackass is always wearing—”

“You mean—?”

But suddenly Mugen sprang up and slid the entrance open so violently that some of the screen tore. 

Jin stood in the doorway, his sword already drawn. 

“Ah,” Jin said simply, sword lowering only a touch, “I was right—it is you,”

“Anybody follow you?” Mugen ask. Fuu picked herself up off the ground. 

“No, I lost their trail as soon as I split off from you guys. I could have sworn they followed you,”

Mugen and Jin’s gaze both darted back to Fuu. 

“No, we were good, far as I could tell,” Mugen admitted. 

“Strange. Only traces I’ve found in this place are yours,”

“Well, what are we complainin’ for?”

But their gaze kept falling back on Fuu. All that morning. All that day (they made it halfway to the next town in one fell swoop and only had to steal a few vegetables to snack on along the way). And all that evening. Fuu busied herself with making the fire again. It had become her thing now. 

“You sure there’s nothin’ you ain’t telling us?” Mugen asked, like he’d been wanting to ask her all day. Fuu had felt the question coming. 

“I don’t ask you guys for your life stories, do I?” She said this softly, not with any bitterness.

She realized she wanted to know more about them; she even wanted to tell them her secrets. But she didn’t trust her own feelings. She didn’t trust that she wouldn’t become attached, and that they wouldn’t leave. Better not to take any chances. Though when she looked at Jin (and she did this more often; she was still trying to get used to his face without any spectacles), she felt a stab of relief that he’d escaped their would-be attackers. She felt relief whenever Jin spoke, because he still spoke like a samurai. Something about Jin was comforting. As comforting as Mugen was unsettling. Because when she looked at Mugen, Fuu felt the beginning of a fire she did not want to coax. But she still kept that kiribi set. She pocketed it with the coins, in a safe space, and she didn’t part with it. It was a comfort to her. Especially since now she looked behind her every night and tried to find lingering faces in the dark.


End file.
